Accidentally or intentionally abuse

While it is necessary to provide healthcare professionals (member of the healthcare team) with privileges to access patient health information, providing too many privileges may backfire when healthcare professionals accidentally or intentionally abuse their privileges.

Ensuring patient privacy and improving patient care quality are two of the most significant challenges faced by healthcare systems around the world. Hence, finding a middle ground, where the necessary privileges are provided and malicious usage are avoided, is necessary.

PhD focus: Collaborative activities

This PhD study highlights the access control matters in collaborative healthcare domain.

Focus is mainly on the collaborative activities that are best accomplished by organized healthcare team within or among healthcare organizations with an objective of accomplishing a specific task (patient treatment).

We investigate the importance and challenges of effective healthcare team treatment, the sharing of patient health records in healthcare delivery, patient data confidentiality and the need for flexible access of the members of the team corresponding to the requirements to fulfill their duties.

The focus is on developing an access control model that balance between healthcare team collaboration and safeguarding sensitive patient information.

Access control model

The major contributions of our access control model include ensuring that access rights are adapted to the actual needs of healthcare providers and providing fine-grained control of access with the minimum necessary standard, whereby healthcare providers are granted minimal access to carry out their duties.